


The Metamorphoses of Hange Zoë

by Hesiones



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Gen, light shipping, who knows if erwin has romantic feelings for her. who knows.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 05:52:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hesiones/pseuds/Hesiones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ancient as the wildflowers growing on the mountainside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Metamorphoses of Hange Zoë

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr request: Hanji really wants that Erwin notices her in a romantic way. 
> 
> The more accurate title would be The Metamorphoses of Annie Leonhardt but it's a given that all my Eruhan has some form of Annie or another in them so uh
> 
> NOTE: BY DIAPHRAGM, I MEAN THORACIC DIAPHRAGM. I didn't know about the _other_ type of diaphragm until much recently thank you very much.

 

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

 

        -    _The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_ _♦  T. S. Eliot_ _  
_

     “Hello.” I smile at Aldith, the soldier who’s keeping watch at the door. She smiles back.

     “Hello, Squad Leader. Just a warning – the Commander is still sleeping.”

     “That’s alright. I only have a bit of news for him, but you can go eat lunch, if you’d like.”

     Aldith nods and salutes. “Thank you, Squad Leader.”

☼ ☼ ☼

     _“Erwin, good morning!”_

_Erwin smiled. “Good morning Hange,” he replied, and left._

_If I were younger, I would have sighed, but I kept quiet and turned back to Sawney and Bean._

_“Good morning to you two, too!”_

☼ ☼ ☼

     I’m not sure when exactly it started. I know the year (and it was many years ago), I know the month, but it was a gradual sort of process, something laying feather upon feather in my diaphragm until I looked at him one day and finally realized that it was hard to breathe. How could it not be, with these strange, soft things fluttering inside me with every inhale, every exhale?

☼ ☼ ☼

_We began to lift the flesh from the neck. Baking in the heat her body emitted, I fought the urge to tell them to go faster, faster – though I was all too aware that she could pull off yet another feat of desperation, we couldn’t afford to hurt her._

_Slowly, the flesh started to tear – muscle fibers snapping in a terrible, horrifying cesarean section that would kill the mother but hopefully result in a live, healthy, helpless child._

_She emerged from the blood-dark, yet bloodless, womb, the exposed flesh of which turned into white steam and gradually dissipated before we could lay eyes on it._ _Her own eyes were wide open, baby blue, glacial and ancient, streaming meltwater. Special are those who are born with eyes open, for they have seen the pain they cause their mothers to come into the light, for they who have seen the most primeval see all. A _t once too old and too young, too much seen in too little time._ There are few things one cannot unsee, and birth is one of them._

_She let out the tiniest, the most desperate of sobs, a newborn’s distressed wail, a baby’s vulnerable whimper. So soft, I’m not sure if anyone else heard it, but I cupped it in my hands and slipped it into my heart to mull over later. Her cry might have been a figment of my imagination, but her tears weren’t._

_But then, we couldn’t look anymore. From her dead mother’s dead womb, she created a new womb; a colder, harder one. A safer one, for we could not rip her out of it. A clearer one, for we could look into it, watch her – in soft red lining, pure and young as birth; in blue adamant, pure and old as time. A gentler one, for she could finally close her eyes._

_So similar is the womb to the tomb. We come from one and return to the other. The earth to the earth. What differences are there in the dusts that we all were, all are, all will be?_

_We wrapped her crystal round with chains, for we could not chain her, and transported her underground (a third womb-tomb, the original womb-tomb). Gazing at her ethereal face in the flickering torchlight, I wondered if she was newly born or newly dead, or both. Such a small girl. So fragile._

_There are few things one cannot unsee, and a child unable to be woken up is one of them._

☼ ☼ ☼

     Strange, soft things die easily in this world. Snow melts, gets trampled into a frozen, muddy slush. Flowers live just long enough to produce seeds, seedlings get crushed back into the soil they tried so hard to emerge from. Children starve, become ill, or if they survive that, their skin becomes rough and callused. Their eyes grow hard, their jaws set solid like fossils encased in mountain rock. They grow tired, too tired to play, until “play” becomes a foreign concept, something alien. What was once familiar is now something strange and soft. We glimpse these somethings, stop awhile to smile fondly or grimace in pain, then move on. Such is the way of the aged and the Reconnaissance Corps. Little is left of the bodies of our young, little is left in the bodies of our old.

     (All our strength, all our agility, all our pretenses of flight, all empty shells.)

     I qualify as old in the Corps – I’m a Squad Leader, after all – but I’m not surprised by all the strangeness and softness in my breathing. Of all the jaded senior members of the Corps, I am perhaps the most outwardly strange and soft. “She loves titans!” “She starts crying when she hurts them!” “No, she starts _screaming_ when she hurts them!” “She greets them like old friends!”

     Haha – strange, certainly. Soft, certainly. Not in her right mind, many say (and there are far more extreme things said about me).

     I understand their bewilderment. There was a time…

     In spite of that, it turns out that I _was_ in my right mind. I was too close to home when greeting the monsters (And aren’t we all?) as friends. Too close when I named them, too close when I screamed _and_ cried while maiming them. I was the eagle who came to eat their liver every day, and they, chained, could only regenerate liver after liver. Days upon days of torture. I don’t know if they feel pain – I know Eren doesn’t feel pain when he’s in titan form, and titans don’t act like they’re in pain when they are injured, but the humans inside them have been fully absorbed. Who knows the many hells they have gone through.

     Of all of us, I was the closest to the truth.

     (Things strange and soft can be terribly fickle. Like the truth, which was – is – eating us alive. Like me, who was searching for the truth, yet wished to unlearn it as soon as it was revealed in all its awful splendor.)

☼ ☼ ☼

_Pain, pain, like my skin was fire and the wind was ice and my world was going to end (and I might have wanted it to end already because I would have much rather faded to black for a long, long time than fade in and out of the black, in and out of this agony – )_

_“Is the situation the same?”_

_( – no, I didn’t.)_

_I don’t remember much, only an urgent need to tell him where they would be going, only the battle to stay awake, to keep my hand from shaking as I pointed out the forest on the map, to keep from screaming from all the burns on my body. Only his constant, composed, bright blue gaze steadying me through my wavering, blurred vision. Only his familiar, beautifully strong face my tether to consciousness._

_Could I have done it without his steadfast presence? Yes, I could’ve, but in the same way I could traverse a path through deep, dark woods without being able to see the end of the trail, the sentinel trees awash with sunlight. I would reach that end regardless, but the day in my eyes dissolved the darkness that tried to take me. It would have taken a lot more energy to fight off the darkness myself._

_Strange and soft, we are._

☼ ☼ ☼

     As Aldith leaves, I turn the brass knob and open the door. Its unoiled hinges squeak (Erwin has probably made sure that they would), but Erwin doesn’t stir. Only now does his exhaustion override his caution. A strange truth softens his Alpine bones, helped by the stubble growing on the cliffs of his jaw.

      Only at his most vulnerable can he recover.

     I slip inside and close the door behind me. It’s not fair. Why does being truthful make us vulnerable?

     No – pretense drains us, until only our shells remain. We build our walls, fighting those who would dare breach them, even though our real enemy has always been inside ourselves.

     Being true exposes us to the elements. Only then do we find out who would take our life from us, who would lay down their life for us, who would keep an eye on us, who would turn their eyes from us. Who would sell themselves to feed us, who would sell us to feed their children. Only then can we begin to confront ourselves.

     I take tentative steps forward, half-hoping that the echo of my boots on the wooden floor won’t wake Erwin up.

     Erwin’s chest continues to rise and fall with a slow, quiet rhythm. I walk the rest of the way to the chair by his bed, and sit.

     Nonetheless, facades are often necessary for those who lead. It must be hard to show strength when you feel weak, Erwin, though you do so better than I ever possibly can.

     You are true, Erwin. Others call you a schemer because they are afraid of your silent machinations, they call you inhuman because they can’t find the fractures in your face of adamant as you watch cities burn and bleed, yet I have known you and your strange, soft, Dreamer’s eyes for so long now, and I know what they dream because every time I look into them, I see the endless summer sky that we would gaze at in awe every time we went outside the Walls. Others think you are deaf to the whimpers of the dying and the anguished keening of those who hold them dear, yet I have known you and your strange, soft, sensitive sorrow for so long now, and I know that you hear every whimper, every keen ten times louder than anyone ever should because I watch you stop sometimes and listen to the silent accusations of the dead echoing in your head. I watch you stop and hunch your shoulders and I hurt for you, too.

     We are not made of crystal – we only cover our soft bodies with it.

     I am loathe to rouse Erwin, but I promise I will do so for only a little while. Then, innocent sleep can go back to healing his wounds.

     My hand hovers over his left shoulder. In the end, he’s a light sleeper. If sound won’t wake him, touch will, as surely as making the first step onto a landscape of pristine white snow mars the still peace.

     Things strange and soft take many forms. This one will have to lie hush, for a storm is approaching, and other strange, soft things must come first.

     I grasp his linen-sleeved shoulder gently, savoring for a visceral moment his warm muscle, his breathing, his living.

     “Erwin, wake up,” I murmur, and when his dreaming eyes flutter open, I salute with my fist upon my heart.

☼ ☼ ☼

_The truth is a little girl buried deep beneath the ground that mothers us all, something strange and soft encased in eons, some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing. Or perhaps that is me and my tendency to view everyone as infinitely gentle and infinitely suffering, but I find that my tendency usually proves true._

_I stared at her in her shelter of adamant. Will there come a day when we find a fracture in her fortress? Will there come a day when we will not torture, kill, or abhor her when she emerges from her shelter?_

_**Well** , I thought, **we’ll find out sooner or later. For now, she rests.**_

_And as if she heard my wordless questions, she seemed to chuckle tiredly and say: “My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.”_

☼ ☼ ☼

             Beauty is truth, truth beauty,  –  that is all

             Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

                             -    _Ode on a Grecian Urn_ _♦_ _John Keats_

**Author's Note:**

> In today's episode of I live and breathe extended metaphors.  
> Small in-text references include _Macbeth_ and T. S. Eliot's _Preludes_


End file.
